Page 37 of Chasing Dreams
He considered that possibility. “So if this woman—or her husband or boyfriend or whoever—came across him, what are they still doing with him?”
“Mistreating him.”
“Yes, but why? A person doesn’t hang on to a strange kid they don’t want to take care of.”
“Maybe there’s something in it for them,” she suggested.
“Ransom? They wouldn’t have known who he belonged to.”
“Unless they saw the accident on the news or in the papers. Jack’s photo was in all the papers.”
“Okay,” he said. “They could know who he was, but then they would have made an attempt at ransom.”
“Nothing like that happened,” she told him.
The waitress brought their pizza and Austin placed a slice on a plate for her. They ate in silence until another thought came to him. “What about his father?”
“Whose father?”
“Jack’s.”
She wiped her lips with a napkin and sat back against the vinyl booth. Finally she said, “My sister didn’t have successful relationships with men. Or boys for that matter. All through junior high and high school she dated one jerk after another.”
She hadn’t answered his question, but Austin waited for her to say it the way she wanted to.
“She just couldn’t stand to be without a boyfriend. Not even for a day. For some reason she needed those jerks to make her feel good about herself, I guess. But they never did.” She glanced down at her plate and back up. “Make her feel good about herself, I mean.
“The time she and Jack lived with me was the first time she’d looked out for herself and what was best for her. She was finally pulling her life together.”
The waitress refilled their glasses, and Austin thanked her.
“I don’t know who Jack’s father was,” she said, finally. “She married this guy named Perry just after Jack was born, but Perry wasn’t the father. She told me it wasn’t important, because the father hadn’t known she was pregnant, and he wouldn’t have cared.”
A fatherless child. The correlation between Jack and himself gave Austin pause.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “About Jack’s father.”
“Maggie was doing just fine without a guy messing up her life for a change,” she said.
“A boy needs a father.”
Her gaze penetrated his attempt at nonchalance. “Did you have one?”
He admitted, “Sure, I had one. He just happened to be married to someone else besides my mother, so he didn’t recognize me as his.”
“Even a father who acknowledges his kids as his, doesn’t necessarily make a good dad,” she returned.
“You speaking from experience?”
“My dad let my mom raise Maggie and me. He went to work, paid the bills and hung out with his cronies on weekends. After my mom died, he moved into a trailer and took up with someone new. We didn’t see each other much. He died a couple of years ago.”
Austin turned the subject back to Maggie. “Do you believe Jack’s father wouldn’t have cared?”
She gave a disgusted sniff. “Oh, yeah. I met the guys she went with. I picked up the pieces after those relationships went bad. She was above those jerks, she could just never see it.”
“So there’s no way that Jack’s father could have planned this to get his son.”
